At age fourteen I awoke from the negligence of my hair to a drawing given to me by a certain suitor in which I appeared nude and hunched over myself, braids undone and falling down my back. The work of a Senegalese woman in Algés, these braids were an entire day in the making, an experience memorable for the bowl of boiling water where, after the woman had finished, I submerged my braids to curl the tips of my extensions. My suitor envisioned me nude, hair long and flowing, which sent me running. After he gave me the drawing, I ran home, and, for a long time, I avoided him, not without curiosity. One day I tried to discover where he’d landed. He’d become a salesman, a family man, something no one could have anticipated.
I was reborn with my new hair extensions—which had never been so long—with a natural air that, at a distance, perplexes me. Within me, I found all the knowledge peculiar to long hair, a way of putting it behind the ears that lasted between each sporadic cut, a natural movement of the shoulders that quickly became a tic, an obsession with rolling the tips around my fingers. This collection of latent gestures, standing by for what never came to be, was in my case the exact opposite of an amputated limb’s enduring life: the prehistory of a nonexistent organ for which we had always been waiting without knowing just how much we missed it. Like my hair extensions, made long in a matter of minutes, I took a leap forward.
It is in the part of this story yet to be written, the part concerning the renting out of castles and construction sites to event organizers, that, with comical marksmanship, in the middle of the ’90s, I gained a sense of pride in my braids. They would sway as I danced, often the only person relatively sober among hundreds of the high; alerted, as I hit puberty, to the dangers of drugs thanks to the shock therapy administered to the tune of the spirit of that time: the lame who stepped out of the trolley in Campolide with perfect stride; a campaign against chemical dependence that would be conducted at my preparatory school when I was eleven years of age and a sense of responsibility that was nothing more than well-timed cowardliness. We’d wake up at five in the morning to the parties that for others were the climax of their nights; we would grab the “night train” and take it to the Clímax club in Jardim Constantino, a girlfriend and I who dreamed of becoming groupies for a band of slackers who attended raves and after-hours parties and met up at the door of a gambling parlor in the vicinity. No one tells this story because there were no observers who were not also participants. Of those who participated, there’s no one left.
It’s dirty, the ethnography of that time. At the raves, in the dark, observers found they were natives, native observers. I would repeat to myself that I was there for the music, trying not to lose track of the stranger wearing a top hat: an eccentric who made the rounds of the buildings, his obsolete form of assistance that of a cane, perhaps from Cacém. Was he looking for someone, that master of ceremonies, impervious to the chamber of loops: a visiting undertaker, perhaps? To follow the undertaker with my gaze was to admit I’d fallen prey, though I swore I knew him from somewhere. To the other side, in front of me, a sweaty neck, making me worry. Drink some water, dummy, I would think, a poor concerned godmother; behind me, in an open-air courtyard, negotiations on the sly over ecstasy, conducted with the gallantry peculiar to the black market. At my side, someone was sticking their tongue out. Beneath the noise, consigned to silence, an acrobatic approach prompted by our need to focus in order to let ourselves go, we were alone. Going to a rave only appeared to be a group endeavor. I would say goodbye to my friends at the door and locate within the noise a cell of my own, synchronizing my heart to the rhythm. Amid the mystery of other hearts joy was nowhere to be found, but rather the obstacle of solitude each time we lost grasp of ourselves. Losing ourselves is nonetheless a noble aspiration and not an effect. No one was looking for the heart of the undertaker lost in his funereal rounds, for which he would have no explanation. It was the omnipresent undertaker who never let me rest: the trace of surveillance I could never shake.
Much of what I know of the Portuguese countryside I learned from those years I spent with friends crossing Ribatejo, the north, and when we went alone to the Algarve, in ’97, for the Festival Neptunus, on the money we’d earned tacking on bar codes at a warehouse in Sintra, under the careful watch of a tyrannical redhead. At lunch, we would eat with a group of older ladies who had been there twenty-seven years and some stern-looking triplets with their hair pulled back. On the trip to Albufeira, that same year spent at the warehouse, riding on a train full of soldiers who’d been challenged by the other ravers to try poppers, they repeatedly whispered in my ear that I had “really crazy” hair. My hair was no longer “that hair.” Two guys began to kiss, but they still didn’t know each other any better for it, nor did they care to. Everyone back then claimed to be sixteen and took into account that from two o’clock in the morning onward, there would be no more water in the faucets at the club.
At my friend Cátia’s place, where we would get ready to go out, and where the host would wear to school the same clothes she wore out at night, I would help fry rissoles for lunch. Hers was a family of medical assistants, truck drivers, pregnant teenagers, and academic failures. One afternoon when I saw her leaving the shower, she dried off in front of me, wiping her privates with a towel and staring at the blood that had appeared there. Where had Oeiras been lost along the way, the decorous sitting room? It was Cátia who took me to the Bairro de Santa Filomena for the first time. We were looking for a relative of hers who lived in an abandoned house; we stood there yelling at the door, shouting, “Anybody home?” We yelled at the ruin, a condemned dwelling on top of a hill, waiting for someone to show up. We had come to claim child support. I can still see us today, yelling at the top of the hill, Cátia hurling insults at the mute ruin in a rage whose origins were elsewhere.
My friends from this time: a blond-haired Rastafari who trafficked drugs; a black Rastafari who lived beneath the train tracks in Rio de Mouro, where one day I was greeted by his grandmothers, and who wanted to marry me; the boy who’d given me the drawing, ten years my senior, who, it was said, swallowed eight pills of ecstasy in a single night; the two sisters without the slightest resemblance who looked down to find lizards crawling out of the arms of the sofas at the Clímax; the boy from Camarate who swore he’d been the first person in Lisbon to wear checkered pants; his friend, who acted as if he were being forced to go to the parties; those who, without knowing a word of English, set off for London only to be barred at the door of Ministry of Sound; those who spent intermissions with their gaze to the ground, consumed by the etiquette of their trade, the transactions that left them crumpled receipts—I never again came across any of them, not in a metro station, nor any city bus, not a single café. I moved to another country, or they did, though only a few kilometers separated us. Once, after some years, I heard my name at the supermarket. It was one of them, and I introduced my husband. The man was straightening bottles on a shelf. These were the first people to boast of my hair.
During one of the three summers our friendship would last, I spent an afternoon with Cátia and her boyfriend at the beach at Carcavelos. Around my waist, I wore a waterproof gold chain. The beach was nothing more than a train station at the end of the line, where we found ourselves semi-nude, but still the same. I would shake my braids at the edge of the sea, a third wheel. Cátia was worried her boyfriend might get up from the towel and covered him with her own body. She whispered in my ear that he had “a hard-on,” an expression I had never heard before. The boys and girls at the station would haul it together toward the sea, gazing at each other’s asses and torsos, and dive into the water with high-flying somersaults, making waves for several feet, bothering the others. They threw pebbles for dogs to chase without heeding the children, smoked hashish in the shade as we read Ragazza, pushed and shoved one another in apparent skirmishes, fell asleep beneath the sun, ate a Magnum, swiped some sunglasses, asked our names, tried to get to know us, and, in the end, took the bus back home, harmless passengers along for the ride, sunglasses perched atop their baseball caps, their black skin spotted with salt marks the sea had left on their arms, their legs, their necks, marks that looked like some dermatological disease, bookish debris in which they’ll never play a part.
One morning, on my way to an after-hours in Ericeira, at Saturday’s, we grabbed a lift from a farmer who’d come along in a wagon. Today I think about us, seated on bales of hay, plastered with makeup, aloof to the beauty of the route, the mare’s trot, our ears glued to a track entitled “Mannikohmium,” pure noise. It was the only time I ever rode in a wagon. The next year, in ’98, I left in the middle of a party asking myself how I’d ever managed to stand that song. It seemed like a decade had passed, but it was only three years of my life.
It’s not essential that we know where we’re going, and there are times we might feel lost or think there’s something wrong with us in some important way. Ambition, a mighty powder keg that doesn’t necessarily bring talent with it and can even encourage mediocrity, guides some of us with persistent fidelity. Ambition accompanied me everywhere I went with a reserve of individuality that refused to be tarnished. Today, it nonetheless surprises me when I think about the fate of those I encountered along the way. Ambition warmed the hearts of some, and it was futile for them in the way it is for me, perhaps. What became of my companions from the ’90s, the troupe of striving traffic controllers, INEM ambulance drivers, cruise ship burger-flippers, Continente checkout clerks, girls who kept boys company, flight attendants, office workers, biological engineers, chemists, classicists, solo guitar players?
I don’t know why I had to commit myself to the aim of finding beauty in that which repels me, but I’ve given in to the pressure to do so more out of consideration for the authenticity of these projects than the allure of those high school years. This authenticity reached its climax in the energy my friends put into afternoon concerts, emerging from the apathy of school biology labs. They stretched out nude and played electric guitar on some apartment terrace, interrupted by the sirens coming from the cars of cut volunteer firemen, whose tender spectacle of familial comedy I followed through a café window. In the same stretch of August, they would turn their hoses on one another, these firemen; they would piggyback the pudgy girls and flee the spurting water, their chests bare and beer bellies emerging from bulging ribs, a world where everyone is cousins and bravery is a family trait. Back on the terrace, our anti-family would drink orange vodka and smoke weed in the sun. At times, in a stroke of poetic inspiration when someone’s parents were traveling, we allowed ourselves to stay awake until the sun rose over the terrace. When I look back at this family today, I can hear us telling tales about a man who kept a lion on the roof of a building in Lisbon’s Bairro Azul, for which there is still photographic evidence. I took part in the ambition of my friends, terrace-top lions, ignoring all the ugliness of the city below, which, as we never tired of saying, would one day be picturesque. Adolescence was merely the exacerbation of what none of us ever wanted to become, as if for a few years we were allowed to be a lesser version of ourselves that could explode in our very hands. The ambition we experienced as a group at this time, which one day would put us in our place, was misplaced and fleeting. It wasn’t yet the disease that my grandfather passed on to me, though it befell him, too.
Manuel convinced me, when I was little, that a luminous future awaited me, as perhaps is advisable to convince all children. What he gave me in those days, when he recited my infantile verses to the family and suggested I read Jules Verne, predicting a literary fate for me, were not means but ends. Only in the young is it possible to induce such daunting ambition. My grandfather abided by his predictions, which he feared he might not live to witness, and, for this reason, what he passed on to me was the condition of his own perpetuation, a blank check concerning his own future, not mine, despite the fact that the two of us did not draw a distinction. Ambition was a reciprocal blessing, and it could only be that way, as it’s not something we can generate within ourselves. How unwarranted was my certainty that I had a luminous fate ahead of me, when, during the ’90s or early 2000s, the nauseating daily life of Lisbon’s dirty little alleyways rose up around me, the smell of urine, condoms, and dirty needles, empty plastic cups I’d also drunk from. What’s for certain, ludicrous though it may seem, is that it has been ambition and not a sense of responsibility that’s protected me throughout this journey. This was the idea my grandfather gleaned from my first quatrains, as though an old man’s eternity could be foretold in the way a child rhymes the word tide with the word petrified. My childhood poems revealed my audience’s future, not mine. Never had the two of us been so close to the life after death as in this fantasy of my Grandpa Manuel.